Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications may refer to technologies that allow devices to communicate with one another over wired or wireless networks. M2M communications can be found in a number of economic sectors, such as security, product tracking, health care, and remote monitoring and diagnostics. An M2M device may include a sensor, a meter, or other device that captures an “event” (e.g., meter reading, temperature, inventory level, etc.), which is relayed through a network (e.g., wireless, wired, or hybrid) to an application that may translate the captured event into meaningful information (e.g., an indication that an item needs to be restocked). Thus, M2M communications may be characterized by periodic, semi-periodic, or on-demand transmission of small amounts of data.
M2M applications are commonly deployed using wireless networks, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks or Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks. M2M devices (or “clients”) are frequently designed as relatively low cost devices that can be deployed by an end-user. Accordingly, the communication intelligence in these M2M devices may be relatively limited. While the data rate from one M2M device could be small, a large number of M2M clients residing in a network may easily exhaust air interface resources, such as a random access channel and/or control channels.